Skyscanner acquired by Ctrip for $1.7B

[stewhuk]

Skyscanner is based in Edinburgh, with another large office in Glasgow. This is huge news for the Scottish tech scene, and will hopefully bring much needed cash to help it thrive. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here in all types of tech.

Sadly Scotland's other unicorn, FanDuel, looks set to close its hq in Edinburgh after merging with draft kings. However, that will probably release a lot of talent to help smaller co's

[ddeck]

Skyscanner is a fantastic service. I'm really hoping CTrip don't bring their dark patterns, spam, and generally scammy behavior to it.

My experiences with Ctrip includes regular price revisions after booking (and after they ensure they have all of your personal information), added fees for "discount coupons" which can't be removed and are only included after they have your payment information, regular spam despite opting out, and various other deceptive behaviors.

Unlike most booking engines, they often advertise firm prices for hotels, flights etc, but don't actually have confirmed inventory and often take days to confirm (or cancel or revise) the booking despite having taking your payment information already. This is only revealed after taking payment info.

There are also reports of them illegally selling children's tickets as adult tickets and trying to sell tickets purchased via mileage. [1]

[1] http://www.shanghaidaily.com/metro/society/Flyers-left-in-lu...

[Finbarr]

Yes this really is phenomenal news for Scotland. Here's hoping they were generous with stock and we see a new wave of angel investors emerge.

According to https://angel.co/skyscanner-2 they last raised almost 200m at a 1.6b valuation. I wonder what kind of terms were attached to that. I'm guessing investors will have walked away with a pretty large chunk of the sale.

[dvdhnt]

> happening here

Does that mean you're living there? I'm curious what the prospects are like there.

There's been more discussion lately about us Americans looking for work abroad. My wife is finally on board with making a move out of the US as a family, so I'm glad it's being discussed more.

[neximo64]

Not to pile onto nationalist sentiment but anything of this size is quite big for the British tech scene too. Heck European too. We don't have many unicorns on this side.

[tomhoward]

The company was formed in 2001 by three IT professionals, Gareth Williams, Barry Smith and Bonamy Grimes, after one of them was frustrated by the difficulties of finding cheap flights to ski resorts.[1]

Lessons: scratching a trivial-seeming personal itch can pay off handsomely in the long term. And it takes a loooong time to make it big in travel.

Like most travel startup founders who've attended industry events over the past few years, I've crossed paths with Gareth and Barry a few times, and found them to be thoroughly warm, supportive and decent people.

This result is fully deserved.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscanner

[donw]

Disclaimer: I'm the Engineering Director for Skyscanner's Japan office.

During my interview process, I had an hour session with Gareth, and since joining the company in February, have had several opportunities to work with him directly.

He is a very kind person, and works hard to take care of both his team and our travelers. It's actually a core part of how we do business: the needs of the traveler come first, and our profit metrics come second.

I'm glad to see people like that be successful.

[contingencies]

From about 2005-2009 I founded a hotel reservation platform in direct competition to CTrip and ELong, both of whom were already Nasdaq listed with deep pockets. I successfully grew the business to the same network size as the competitors on a shoestring budget through automation, undercutting them on almost every property, and even offered services in six human languages (they almost managed 2). We received rave reviews from users, most of whom were local. The problem was, I didn't have the capital for a marketing budget, every advertising channel we tried had very low returns, and I was not confident enough to seek capital domestically. I still think there is loads of room for alternative booking platforms here in China, but the up-front capital costs to buy in to a large enough audience remain fairly significant.

[paradite]

What do you think of the current competitors like Tuniu.com and Qunar.com?

[fatman13gg]

> From about 2005-2009 I founded a hotel reservation platform in direct competition to CTrip and ELong

So it's hotels only? No flights, cars etc?

[Fifer82]

Well done SkyScanner! I live 20 minutes from Edinburgh, and I don't really see what others are saying here. I am in a very flexible but really lame paid role, I have friends who have offered me a job in England twice. In Edinburgh though, it is either corporate jobs (demand), low paid hacky jobs for media agencies (pays in peanuts), and everything else is 50k jobs paying 28k via a recruitment agency who skims all the cream... ie: You need to be a mug.

Otherwise where are people seeing all the tech jobs?

[nemesisj]

Well, my company Administrate is hiring in Edinburgh and we are still a fairly early stage (~50 people) startup. We pay pretty well. Check out www.getadministrate.com

[johnnyfaehell]

> everything else is 50k jobs paying 28k via a recruitment

I have no idea how that even works. Every time I got a job from a recruiter in the UK I got 100% of the month. Recruiters get paid on top of what you get paid, not you paying them.

[garagemc2]

This is great news for skyscanner. Unfortunately, the media in the UK will go all nativist and claim that Britain is being sold out to foreign countries, as they did with ARM.

[welly]

Yep. I can see it now...

"Scottish technology firm Skyscanner sells out to foreign interests".

vs.

"British technology firm Skyscanner does something the media sees in a positive light"

[kowdermeister]

I had to double check the number. Never thought that Skyscanner was this profitable.

[samsonradu]

Hell, me too! I use SkyScanner quite often and it's a great product, but the price still seems out of line. Maybe there's more to it than users see. How does it monetize its users?

[dorianm]

Skyscanner is so good, even travel agencies use it (source: a french travel agency).

[jpatokal]

Interesting -- this may be the largest foreign acquisition by a Chinese internet company to date? Largest I'm aware of was Riot Games by Tencent, which was on the order of $400 million.

[jonknee]

Tencent also bought Supercell for $8.6 billion.

[ben_utzer]

No mentions of Kayak? I use kayak because they seems to be more up to date. Sometimes other players don't have the special offers that kayak already shows. Sometimes kayak is also slow to update.

I tried also other metasearches, but they mostly have offers from rubbish sites that show good prices and then you get a huge CC bill.

[yomly]

Whoa huge news - great bit of business for a UK tech company.

[kleiba]

Question: what's going to happen to the personal data of previous customers? Can they easily (read: legally) be moved out of the EU to China?

[whistleblowr786]

Wouldnt it be considered a conflict of interest if the original founder of Ctrip Neil Shen, later invests in Skyscanner as a Sequoia VC-raises its valuation and then gets it acquired by Ctrip.

[robk]

CoI to whom? Ctrip I assume? I don't think China really recognizes that concept in business from what I've been able to ascertain.

[kilroy123]

As an American, I find there are better tools for finding domestic flights. However, for international flights, Skyscanner is always my go to tool.

[smnscu]

I've been using Google Flights exclusively since it was released, I love the UX.

[batiudrami]

Yeah SkyScanner is easily the best for international flights. Obviously in most countries a locally based competitor is going to be better for domestic flights.

[tiatia]

Really? I always was not impressed. I use vayama.com and dohop.com

[JoshTriplett]

I tend to use Hipmunk for both domestic and international flights; I haven't seen anything that comes close to Hipmunk's UI for presenting flights. What's the main advantage of Skyscanner?

[samfisher83]

Do they use ITA as their back end software?

[benjaminRRR]

SkyScanner is not an agency, they use other players to provide the content and fulfil the product so they'd have no use for ITA.

[Torn]

Nope, it's currently a meta-search that owns its own data layer. As to what the future will bring let's see!

[freddyc]

Loved using Skyscanner when I lived in the UK - great news for them!

[amelius]

Any people here who know how Skyscanner compares to Google Flights?

[Marazan]

Well, that's a surprise

[JamiePrentice]

Congrats Skyscanner!

[toomuchstuff]

Ctrip, a Chinese corporation

[grzm]

Business is increasingly global. Deals of this nature are not so surprising. Would you expand on your comment?